US President Donald Trump pushed for schools to reopen and sharply disagreed with the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who warned this week against sending students back to class too soon.
“We have to get the schools open, we have to get our country open,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business aired yesterday.
“I totally disagree with him on schools,” the president said of Anthony Fauci’s words of caution at a Senate hearing earlier in the week.
Fauci told lawmakers there would have to be a “step-by-step” assessment of whether the dynamics of the outbreak would be right for schools to reopen in the autumn, and noted no vaccine would be available for use by then.
Fauci, who is one of the most prominent faces on Trump’s coronavirus task force, also warned of the dangers to children of a virus that doctors are still struggling to understand.
“I think we better be careful [that] we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune from the deleterious effects,” he said, pointing to cases of a dangerous inflammatory syndrome in very young coronavirus patients.
“There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” Fauci said.
Trump downplayed the risks of the virus to children in the interview.
“I think we have to open our schools, young people are very little affected by this,” he said.
On Wednesday, Trump said Fauci had not given “an acceptable answer” in his congressional testimony.
“Anthony is a good person, a very good person. I’ve disagreed with him,” Trump said in a segment of the interview on Fox Business.
“Now, we want to do it safely, but we also want to do it as quickly as possible. We can’t keep going on like this. You’re having bedlam already in the streets,” he said. “I totally disagree with him on schools.”
The president has been eager to reopen schools and businesses to restart the economy as soon as possible, and has often clashed with the guidance of health officials.
His focus on getting the US economy back open is gaining momentum as businesses struggle to stay solvent and millions of Americans register for unemployment relief.
Adding to the high stakes is the November election, in which Trump is arguing he will steer the country back to healthy economic times, while his Democratic opponent Joe Biden accuses the Republican of mishandling the pandemic and so worsening the fallout.
So far, Trump has stuck with Fauci, but the doctor is increasingly in the background as the president pushes his reopening message.
Meanwhile, the president is mobilising the US military to distribute a novel coronavirus vaccine when one becomes available and will focus first on older Americans.
“You know, it’s a massive job to give this vaccine,” Trump said in the interview on Fox Business. “Our military is now being mobilised so at the end of the year, we’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly.”
He said he believes there will be a vaccine by the end of the year and the United States is mobilizing “our military and other forces” on that assumption.
The White House has set a target of having 300mn vaccine doses by the end of 2020.
No such vaccine for this pathogen has been approved though a number are under development, and producing and distributing an effective vaccine are seen as key steps to jumpstarting the US economy.
Trump’s timetable conflicts with that given by Fauci in his Senate testimony on Tuesday.
Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, said that the idea that there will be a vaccine available by next fall, when schools and universities resume classes, was “a bridge too far”.